> In today's world, almost everything we purchase is pure garbage. The food is overly processed and with excessive use of chemicals and added sugar, the furniture is from cheap material and shoddily built, the building we live in was built cutting corners ...
Everything that existed in the past is still being made and is available for purchase. You just have to pay the price. If you are a commoner with a job, your real income is a tiny fraction of what a worker was paid in the past, thanks to inflation. So mass produced garbage is what is available within your budget.
More than half of the working age population in industrialized nations do not work (including many who are employed). A good part of the population have never worked a day in their life and will grow old and die without ever having done anything useful. Everybody else has to pay for their sustenance, and one way is the general decay you see.
If a few billionaires stopped sucking up all the money, we could sustain pretty much everyone without those compromises. But that's not gonna make shareholders happy.
But I find that even expensive items are not guaranteed to be of quality. As one example, take luxury cars with defects and horrible build quality from Tesla. The other day we had a whole thread about how bad sofas are today, even the expensive ones. In the service front, I've spent crazy amounts of money on doctors out of pocket after failing to get good answers from the health insurance folks (here it's different compared to the US) and got the same type of incompetence.
Selling mediocre products/services is simply more profitable.
Even if you spend the extra money, the incentive for luxury items is many times to still sell you similarly bad products/services and pocket the difference for even more profit. It's so frustrating.
It's easy to blame billionaires or other far away people, but rotten businessmen and politicians wouldn't have floated to the top unless the underlying society wasn't also rotten. Avarice is a global and local issue, most of us have family members with this disease. Most people here on this board will succumb to the disease in time. That's why people are hesitant to talk about it or solve the problem. Instead we blame billionaires or the president or the archduke of Austria, thinking that they are the root of the problem.
Agreed. To be fair, personally I don't blame billionaires per se. They are mere proxies for the real issue: the profit motive.
But it's easier to sell that billionaires should not exist than it is to sell that we shouldn't seek to profit over each other, given how profitable it is for a few and how much some people hopelessly seek wealth.
Everything that existed in the past is still being made and is available for purchase. You just have to pay the price. If you are a commoner with a job, your real income is a tiny fraction of what a worker was paid in the past, thanks to inflation. So mass produced garbage is what is available within your budget.
More than half of the working age population in industrialized nations do not work (including many who are employed). A good part of the population have never worked a day in their life and will grow old and die without ever having done anything useful. Everybody else has to pay for their sustenance, and one way is the general decay you see.